Sam from Gadgets and Khajiits talks with Exploding Kittens' Elan Lee about the origins and the future of the next big card game!
Official Xbox Magazine: ''Veteran Alternate Reality Game creator Elan Lee - the man behind such viral hits as Halo 2's I Love Bees ARG and The Beast for Steven Spielberg's film A.I. - has spoken at some length about how storytellers might make use of connected platforms like Xbox 360 and Xbox One.''
So what does that make PC? Eons into the future?
It's funny how these dated features were included in the XB1 and everyone calls it the "future" when ALL of these things have been around on PC for years.
Is this serious or has marketing buzz-feed reached a new height of stupidity?
its the future of consoles. and dedicated servers and kinect are more available for devs on Xbox One.
Dedicated servers have been available for decades & was almost exclusively used until Xbox Live came into existence. This cloud talk is absolute nonsense.
what i meant was that devs on Xbox One can get dedicated servers for very cheap. Dedicated servers are usually very expensive which is why most games don't have dedicated servers.
little off-topic:
People still don't believe in cloud processing?
ignorant fools.
@grassyknoll:
It's not about available technology. Super computers exist and far more powerful than any PC, yet it's hardly reachable.
Why do you think consoles gain significant marketshare against PC and why PC competes on (lower) price and not the content?
Time and time again, it is never technology, but ease of use, approachability and convenience that wins.
Cloud is just an "efficient use, easy and convenient way" to harness massive number of computers concurrently, but this is exactly why Amazon and Azure is huge. Accessability!
Same way, Kinect in every box will make it accessible and easy to use coupled with crazy technology to track facial expressions, body skeleton, voice and even heartbet you got some serious potential there.
Regarding dedicated servers on PC, do anyone have this:
"We[Microsoft] have something over a million servers in our data center infrastructure. Google is bigger than we are. Amazon is a little bit smaller. You get Yahoo! and Facebook, and then everybody else is 100,000 units probably or less."
http://www.neowin.net/news/...
It means almost anywhere in the world, you are likely to get the best online experience to Azure.
No developer, no publisher and no other console manufacturer can match this.
Azure is just a MS product to enter the data center market and put a pretty label on it. Has been around for a while now, but this is nothing exclusive to MS.
Oh, yeah, and BTW. Those were called "Data Centers" before some marketing buff decided it has to be "the cloud".
@cyguration, What does this news have to do with pc? Hes talking about TV and games being co-developed, so quick to hate your comment is off topic as if you didn't read anything but the headline.
"We've got this interest now in redefining what storytelling is and to convey these stories across hardware, across a network that's already established and has this audience," he concluded. "That puts Microsoft years ahead of anyone else out there. And the fact that they are this excited to use that advantage to tell really good stories and to hire a team that can tell those really good stories, that's just exactly where I want to be in the world."
-I don't see what he said wrong, he works for a Microsoft's LA studio, he's talking about how Microsoft has an advantage in the development of a TV series based on interactive games, specifically Remedy's Quantum Break at their London Studio. Yeah he acts like its the next greatest thing but that's par for the course in this business when you are involved with a project, no different then sony folks, but when sony says it the faithful bow without question. Instead of just reading the headline and automatically hating everything xbox how about try actually reading it give some valid reasons he's wrong or why you disagree.
@grassyknoll and Hammad, uhm yeah dedicated servers have been around but a few games out of hundreds is hardly proof that they were very capable of using them significantly over the life cycle last gen.
@Ju, I'm not sure what they were called or what they were initially for but does it matter, THEY ARE THERE AND AVAILABLE to be used as dedicated servers for games ask Titanfall devs http://www.respawn.com/news... many, many sources confirm Azure is a huge versatile asset 2nd only to the worlds largest online retailer Amazon.
@Jokes
Then where was it for 360? There's maybe 2 games on 360 with dedicated servers, I'm not sure if Halo even has them anymore.
yeah very futuristic indeed lol they'll say anything to sell Microsoft just like when their ad say better than Samsung better than apple lol microsoft is so full of them selves and ppl buy into that
@Hammad
Well looking at the console exclusives so far heres the situation:
Titanfall will use them.
http://www.respawn.com/news...
Forza5 will use them.
http://www.polygon.com/2013...
At Pax they basically confirmed dedicated servers for Killer Instinct
"dedicated Xbox Live servers meaning things like P2P and host migration will be a thing of the past."
http://www.capsulecomputers...
Halo 5 we don't know anything about it but I think even you would bet it will use dedicated servers since these games are.
I doubt Ryse, DR3, QB, D4, Crimson Dragon, Sunset Overdrive(maybe I dont know exactly the gameplay) or Project Spark or any I forgot, given their game type needs them.
Im not sure why they didn't use them more on 360, maybe something to do with them first focusing on continuing to building them around the world to its current status, this doesn't happen overnight you know? but more importantly they are using them NOW, even at the very start of this gen, I'd say thats a good sign for future X1 online games
@Ju though what I'm assuming is not gaming related. Windows Azure has the most powerful servers in the world and it has enterprise quality backend softwares. Most of the supreme websites and applications are hosted in Azure. Please know before what you say. Don't talk random shit that comes out of your mouth.
Well these features need to arrive on consoles one day or the other don't you think? What's laughable is there statement "Years Ahead Of Anyone Else Out There".
Xbox One = 1230 GFLOPS + 5GB DDR3 (allocated for games)
GTX 680 (MY GPU + one year old) = 3090 GFLOPS (2.5X more powerful) + 2GB GDDR5
On a serious note, maybe a few years behind.
You are naive for measuring console hardware specs in analogy with PC.
X Hardware in a console is different than the same X hardware on PC...
Go find me a PC game that has PS3 hardware inside it (the SAME) and it could produce a game like The Last of Us.
You see when writing code to a console, you write "straight to the metal" there are no bottlenecks, no OS to run in the background and a gazillion other .exe files, also in console the hardware is 100% exploited and efficiently used... in your PC you barely get your true power ever exploited efficiently.
Nobody cares enough about your awesome numbers, they are there just to impress you, a kind of dick measuring, that goes wasted because no one is going to optimize a game specifically for your hardware. They just throw code in there, hoping that the more power you have the more all the lazy programming work they did will be hidden because of your specs.
That is why for years now all you get is console ports and you just enjoy them in higher resolution, better AA and a texture pack thrown in there.
Will be fun watching you needing an upgrade in 1 or 2 years now that next gen consoles arrive and you will finaly be able to see just what all those TERAFLOPS you have could be doing instead of playing Assassins Creed III in 2880 resolution.
On a realistic note, though, you should really learn about architecture instead of just copy/paste numbers of flops. But it's okay if it's beyond your limits, as it seems. Lol
Just saying, at this point, you're spending hundreds for marginally better graphics.
That's like saying PC existed before smart phones (like iPhone) and therefore it wasn't revolutionary.
The revolution and therefore innovation isn't in technology availability, but harnessing it in a new manner that compels you to use it more.
Console market hasn't grown bigger by just doing what PCs can, but by making it more approachable.
Why do you think PC gaming competes on price and not on it's own merit. Same game, cost more on console, because the value proposition of console is bigger to the gamer.
The same way, the smart phones and tablets are taking over the PC market. Laptops existed for a long time prior to those devices right?
Like it or not, MS is one of the few companies in the world that has the resources and the opportunity to redefine entertainment.
Who else has over a million servers? Who else has the resources to keep those servers?
"We[Microsoft] have something over a million servers in our data center infrastructure. Google is bigger than we are. Amazon is a little bit smaller. You get Yahoo! and Facebook, and then everybody else is 100,000 units probably or less."
http://www.neowin.net/news/...
They got the infrastructure and putting humongous resources into creating new interactive entertainment using Kinect and voice. I think that is hugely ambitious.
Quantum Break is a first foray into this and I expect it to be delicously good coming from Remedy!
Still, even with those "amazing servers" (which they still haven't confirmed the number of physical or virtual, massive difference) they've shown us 0 benefit so far. Everything's been done.
@gildarts
wow cloud server huh
http://www.eurogamer.net/ar...
unless you can provide me with a better reason than
the article above maybe i take this cloud thing a consideration
I would totally trust the limited imagination of Eurogamer instead of a multibillion dollar company investing over $4 billion dollars sitting on over a million servers and one of the companies in the world spending most on R&D.
"We have something over a million servers in our data center infrastructure. Google is bigger than we are. Amazon is a little bit smaller. You get Yahoo! and Facebook, and then everybody else is 100,000 units probably or less."
http://www.neowin.net/news/...
When you can "supposedly" stream high fidelity games over the internet with Gaikai, but yet you cannot improve games using cloud?
That smells of BS to me and highly biased view!
"I would totally trust the limited imagination of Eurogamer instead of a multibillion dollar company investing over $4 billion dollars sitting on over a million servers and one of the companies in the world spending most on R&D. "
Same logic I use.
You would have to be some kind of sucker to believe journalists, trying to fill ad space, over a company that is pouring billions of dollars into R&D for something that a small group of uninformed people consider to be "smoke and mirrors".
Ha, these people will be eating their words when they see the sort of experiences MS will be able to bring to the table.
@nukeitall Yeah you can stream a high quality game but all the processing is being done on the server side and not locally. Having both the Local Machine and Server working to render frames together is not a viable option considering the GPU can do alot in such a short time.
When you start using the server to offload stuff you have to consider a very large delay (milliseconds) for information to be sent out and come back to you at your device and those milliseconds is a long time in the computing world especially if you have a game running at 60 frames a second so each rendered frame will have to call to the server which isnt fast enough to keep in sync with each frame thats being rendered in a single second locally. So if anything cloud rendering is a bottleneck.
@fossilfern:
There are also latency INsensisitive computations that can be done in the cloud, freeing the console to focus on rendering.
Even Sony wants to use the GPU for general processing. Why? Because certain computations are way costly and cannot be done on the CPU alone. You can offload that to the GPU or you can offload it to the cloud!
Cerny himself says:
"By year 3 or 4, I think we'll see a lot of GPGPU [General-purpose computing on graphics processing units], which is to say that the GPU will be used for a lot of things not directly tied to graphics. So physics, simulation, collision detecting or ray casting for audio or the like."
http://www.videogamer.com/n...
@nukeitall your right there could be some things that don't require a lot of resources but if they dont require that many resources whats the point in offloading them ?
Yeah GPU computation is faster since its parallel but again sony is talking about local computation. Engine and technology refinements should be the focus other than dumping things on "the cloud".
@fossilfern:
"your right there could be some things that don't require a lot of resources but if they dont require that many resources whats the point in offloading them ?"
What? Don't understand what you are talking about?
I never said, "don't require a lot of resources". I said latency insensitive which is completely different.
Imagine if you need to compute the lighting, it could send the game state (similar to a small save file) to the cloud which uses about 100 computers to pre-compute then return the data. The Xbox One knows you won't reach that place until 5 seconds. If data doesn't arrive, do the computation locally.
There is no well in hell a PS4/Xbox One is going to match the computing muscle of a 100 computers for instance.
@Nukeitall are you implying that lighting isn't resources intensive? Your mad. and Xbox one predicting Where you'll be in 5 seconds, are you playing time crisis or something? Games like Battlefield, with it's destruction, offloading lighting won't work well at all it doesn't matter how "low latency " the offload is it still has go through the internet to the server and back to your Xbox which is still slower than it being done locally.
And you quoted GPGPU from Mark but he was talking about the GPU in the PS4 doing the calculations not the cloud.
@nuke
ummm...no.
The game loop(which the graphics loop is typically locked to, although not always) runs between 30-60 times per second. This means that a single loop at 30 loops per second can withstand a 33.33ms latency time. The lighting is calculated per frame after the game state is calculated to determine how to render the image.
Now, I don't know what kind of internet you have, but 33ms latency on the internet is quite rare. The best connection I've seen run an average of a 100ms latency. This means that you could only process 1 in every 3 frames for lighting, which isn't practical in a scene that moves, especially when you take into account shadows and shaders which is a part of lighting. Mmost people around the world will see wildly different latency times. There are ways to get higher ping rates, but they aren't practical for a gaming scenario which tends to work in small packets unless the X1 somehow operates on two different network protocols through one connection, which in itself causes it's own problems.
At most, you may see some stuff which doesn't require real time rendering done off-site, which can in itself free up the system, but it is wildly inconsistent for the end users, and even among a single persons own experience with the game.
It's be more prudent to just render the entire game on the server, which is what Gaikai apparently does.
In other news Microsoft releases Dragon's Dogma on Xbox Live to purchase. Truly years of advancement right there, releasing games 4 months after their release to ensure your servers don't get overloaded.
I wonder what other games that are 5gbs or less that Microsoft plan on giving away with the games for gold.
Again truly they are the kings of the future. I wonder will the Xbox One have a ridiculous limit on games online like the current laughable 2gbs?
For example, if State of Decay is as good as people say (and this developer will refuse to release their next game on their platform when they are pushed around by Microsoft until they can take it no more like everybody else) imagine how incredible it would have been if they had have released it on Xbox Live 2 or 3 years ago. Oh wait they couldn't because the 2gb limit on 360 is a very recent thing.
But oh my so futuristic.
Consolidation, integration, and streamlined experiences ARE the future.
How daft do you have to be to not realize that? Where have things been heading for the past 20 years? I mean, really....
@cyguration
Come on cyguration you already know console marketing depends 100% on STUPIDITY.
You are correct the XB1 isn't doing NOTHING new that the PC hasn't already been doing for years.
Playing a game along with watching a tv show....I had a Action Max that allowed me to do this like 25 years ago and the TV show wasn't even designed for the Action Max, Captain Power I believe was the show.
You could shoot the on screen bad guys and score points.
Thank you.
I can't believe there are people in here buying into this marketing buzz like it's a fresh new flavor of pizza.
It's sad we've reached this point in gaming where the console wars isn't even about console features anymore, but multimedia stuff that's available right now on just about any smartphone or tablet.
Bro, bro, everybody knows teh powa of da cloud is infinite and only MS has the technical know how and experience to handle such power. I mean if anybody else even attempts it they could lose a hand or a leg or maybe a get a bad paper cut.
LMAO! Bubbles+ for funny
just in case nobody realizes this but Nvidia's Grid is more advanced than Microsoft's Xbox Cloud Services!
The Nvidia's Grid has some HUGE companies behind it that they seem to have said the HELL with gaming and are doing other things with it!
@JokesOnYou
I DID READ THE ARTICLE and that is why I responded with what I responded with. There is NOTHING about this that is the future or beyond what anyone else is doing. We already have this.
You ever heard of House of Cards? Do you not watch original content on YouTube?
He's talking about features coming to the Xbox One that's already available elsewhere and trying to use marketing buzzwords to dupe people like you into believing they're doing something revolutionary.
I made the comment because on PC this stuff is par the course. There's nothing here about the "future", it's just finding ways to monetize (since all this stuff is behind a paywall anyway) features that you can experience elsewhere for free.
Do you really want to bet that I won't be able to watch the new Halo TV series on my PC at some point? Because give or a take a short period of time, I'm pretty sure I can.
Says official Xbox magazine, I wonder what an independent source like digital foundry would say... Hmmm.
The dreamcast was, it was online from the start and had a great gpu the could do multipass rendering something the ps2 never could
The DC was really ahead of it's time. Ironically MS helped Sega design the system and UI. All the features of the DC made it into the first Xbox as far as I'm aware.
